The Eastern Stars - Mark Kurlansky [52]
When Sosa was fifteen years old, Acevedo signed him to the Phillies and hid him away in Santo Domingo for training with some forty other prospects, most of them older, some on their way to America. Acevedo brought Sosa’s mother to Santo Domingo to negotiate the signing bonus. According to Sosa’s autobiography, the negotiation process gave her the sickening feeling that she was selling her own son; demoralized, she accepted the first offer, which was $2,500.
Acevedo began training the boys and fattening them up at the university in Santo Domingo. They practiced and worked out from nine a.m. until three or four in the afternoon. “They fed us, washed our clothes,” said Julio Franco about Acevedo’s training program. “We all ate a lot. We were very skinny. Four times a day as much as you wanted. But we were running all day. Then we ate. Then we went to sleep.”
Sosa was in the last group of prospects whom Acevedo signed to the Phillies. Acevedo had a falling-out with the organization and these last players never got their bonuses, nor did the Phillies send for them. They were simply dropped—a bitter disappointment for an impoverished Dominican teenager who had thought his life was about to be changed by Major League Baseball. The Atlanta Braves, Rico Carty’s team, were very interested in San Pedro at the time and signed some of the best of this group. But Sosa was still young, only sixteen, and undeveloped.
Sosa went back to working with his old team and went to every scout and every tryout he could find. It was the 1980s and San Pedro was full of scouts, especially after the previous wave of rookies: Bell; Franco; Samuel; the shortstop Rafael Ramírez from Angelina, whom Pedro González had signed to the Braves; and Pedro Guerrero, the Dodgers’ popular first baseman from Santa Fe. But no one was interested in scrawny Sammy Sosa. Sosa remembers Pedro González taking a look at him and saying that he didn’t sign “undersized players.” González denied this story in his sometimes unmusical Cocolo, saying, “That’s bullshit.” He argued that he would never dismiss a player for being too small, pointing out that he had signed Rafael Furcal, who, at five feet, nine inches, was one of the smallest players in the major leagues.
For two months Sammy played at the training camp Epy Guerrero had set up in the bushes just inland from Santa Domingo. Guerrero had said he liked Sosa; Sammy hoped Epy would sign him. He never did. Sosa spent a year in this desperate limbo while George Bell and Julio Franco were becoming stars. But a new scout in the Dominican Republic, Omar Minaya, was looking for Dominican talent for the Texas Rangers. Minaya offered Sosa a signing bonus of $3,000. Sosa asked for $4,000 and they settled on $3,500. Sosa would be saved. According to Sammy—not always a reliable source—he gave $3,300 to his mother and bought a used bicycle.
The Dominican players all had different temperaments, but they had one thing in common: they were determined to make it, because there was simply no other option. George Bell said, “Being cocky, I always knew I would play in the majors. I knew I could do it. I could see a breaking ball from a fastball. I just knew. I could see it.”
Julio Franco put it another way: “My feeling was I have to make it. It’s all I’ve got. I mean, you leave school and that’s all you’ve got. Of course, that was also true of the many more who didn’t make it.”
PART TWO
DOLLARS
La esperanza es la muerte de la muerte.
La esperanza es la esperanza
de reanudar la juventud del pueblo.
Hope is the death of death
Hope is the hope
to restore people’s youth.
—Pedro Mir, “Concierto de Esperanza para la Mano Izquierda” (“Concert of Hope for the Left Hand”)
CHAPTER EIGHT
The Fourth Incarnation of San Pedro
The oldest and most timeless part of San Pedro, Punta de Pescadores, never had a single reincarnation. Just before the bridge leading to the town along the mangrove coast of the Río Higuamo, slightly upriver from the port on the opposite side, was a little village of pastel one-story